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comments:

That's an interesting perspective. It seems you're thinking of the X-factor as sort of the thing that makes each raid different? Or that makes each one challenging? Or both?

However, at the same time, I've read you complaining about being tired of running the same instances all the time. Wouldn't making dungeons random in their design to some degree make you get bored slower?

I do have to agree that the people doing the strategizing are often a minority. =/ So, what if just 5-mans were randomized, and raids were left as is then? I know some people don't get bored with raiding as quickly, if they're not on the bleeding edge, but in WotLK it seemed like almost everyone got pretty tired of running 5-man heroics all the time. Same with TBC for that matter. Challenge aside, wouldn't some randomly generated stuff make it a little less boring? Or is that just an aspect that doesn't matter to you?

I'm reminded of old 5,10 man instances that could take hours to complete with your average pug.

The instances were exactly the same, yet someone always pulled the rookery or forgot about the patrols that always come. The instances were the same but in a pug how well you did would be a grabbag because you never knew what you were going to get in terms of raid composition, gear and skill.

If I grouped with the same people ALL the time, I wouldn't mind variety in a dungeon so much. Because the variables of what you and your teammates can do are better known.

Another example, players can do achievements in instances, but how many times have I heard "let's not bother with it". I agree sometimes the achievements are a degree harder, but sometimes it just involves doing things in a different way (to some extent random). And I think the reason why I hear that response is, people want to get their instance done the quickest way possible.

So ultimately, any sort of increase in difficulty and unpredictability is going to be damaging for a portion of players; namely pugs. Yeah, I see your point then, this is a change that would benefit most the competitive minority. =/

I suppose you could try to correspondingly reduce the actual difficulty of the instance. And really, even when I was in really lame pugs, it would have been at least slightly more interesting to wipe on something unexpected than to wipe on something that we should have expected. I donno.